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The real Republican response to the President’s State of the Union address did not come from the parched lips of Florida Senator Marco Rubio—the latest in a long line of GOP sacrificial lambs to follow the SOTU with campaign style complaints and endless stories of personal hardship that do little to actually address any of the proposals put forth by the President.

Nor did we get anything of value from Rand Paul’s barely viewed, Tea-Party directed rant.

The true GOP response to last night's address came from the mouth of last year’s Republican post-SOTU orator, Rep. Paul Ryan.

In a succinct response to the Obama address delivered during a post-game interview on CNN, Ryan noted that there was much to like in the President’s speech—including proposals to close tax code loopholes that would help raise money for the nation’s treasury. What troubled Congressman Ryan was his concern that the money raised by closing the loopholes in the tax code would be spent in the pursuit of new government programs rather than being put to work in the effort to pay down our deficit.

Ryan’s’ comments were far more on point and responsive to the actual SOTU address than those of the water swilling Rubio and managed to get to the real heart of the matter—something Rubio never came close to accomplishing.

At this point, I should probably point out what will come as a surprise to absolutely no one and reveal that I responded well to the agenda laid out by the President in last night’s annual tradition. It was, after all, a veritable laundry list of actions designed to appeal to the hearts of liberals—like me—everywhere.

Nevertheless, Paul Ryan’s observation that the President may have come up short on the subject of deficits is not an unfair one—even if it speaks to only one half of the story.

While Mr. Obama went to some pains to cover the importance of continuing to work toward reducing our burgeoning debt through a combination of cuts in Medicare coupled with closing the tax loopholes, his speech would have greatly benefitted from devoting additional time to a more honest appraisal of what is required to get serious about deficit cutting and the realities we face in regard to the same.

The President was correct in his assertion that we have already reduced the deficit by some $2.5 trillion. And while Obama opponents are never quite comfortable acknowledging this accomplishment, it is, nonetheless, true and a fact supported in the report issued early this week by the highly respected, bi-partisan Committee For A Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). More on what the CRFB had to say in a moment.

Where things got a bit dicey in last night's speech began with the President’s suggestion that we need only cut an additional $1.4 trillion over the next ten years to reach financial stability—a figure that fails to tell the entire story about what is in store for us without some real work to reduce the debt and may, in and of itself, be less than an accurate representation of what is required to meet even the President's accepted standard of fiscal stability.

As Mr. Obama noted, there are, indeed, economists who have suggested that a total of $4 trillion in cuts—$2.5 trillion of which have already been accomplished—would put us at a debt to GDP ratio of 70 percent by 2023, thereby stabilizing the debt for the next ten years or so.

However, other objective analysts, including the CRFB, put the number closer to $2.4 trillion of additional cuts that would be necessary to get us through 2023 on a trajectory that would represent turning our upwardly trending deficit in the other direction.